1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to computer systems, particularly computer systems capable of operating one or more tasks or processes simultaneously. Specifically this invention relates to the method for communicating the status of such tasks or processes operating in a computer system. Also, this invention still more specifically relates to a means for communicating that a process is running, stopped, running intermittently, or has unexpectedly halted. Furthermore, this invention relates to devices for displaying or communicating the status of processes within a computer which convey the appearance of motion without requiring the processing overhead of animations. For the purposes of this patent application, computer system is defined as one or more computational devices, employing processing units and methods of communicating data between such processing units. Such a computer system may be a single "stand-alone" computational device or a "network" of more than one computational device.
Providing a method of communicating the status of a process within a computer is essential to the development, use and quality assurance of computer software and its processes. However, a monitor device that remains static even when the process has halted provides misleading information and a monitor device that is continually animated uses valuable processing cycles within the computer, such use of processing cycles is often unacceptable and self-defeating. For example, it is often necessary to know how much of the processing power of a computer is being used by a particular process, and to simultaneously know whether that particular process is still operating. Continuously animated monitor devices will generally give misleading information under these conditions.
An alternative is to have no process monitor at all. Such an approach means that the user of the computer system will be left without any information as to whether a requested computer process is running or has stopped. Failing to have process status information is particularly troublesome where the process is expected to take a not insignificant amount of time. Examples of such processes are: data base searches, complex mathematical or modeling functions, network (including Internet) searches and access, electronic communication, saving, restoring, disk media back-up and other disk operations.
2. Description of Related Art
Computer status monitors are well known in the prior art. Such examples as a moving bar, a series of dots, a hourglass, a clock or a flashing curser are well established. Status monitors of other electronic devices are similarly well known, including the following examples: flashing or strobing lights, panels of light emitting diodes, liquid crystal display devices, mechanical toggle indicators, transparent or semi-transparent panels the permit visual access to the interior of a device whose motion itself give some indication of activity. However, the applicant knows of no computer process monitor which is designed to present the appearance, thereby communicating, of activity without requiring significant processing resources for its maintenance. Moreover, the applicant is unaware of a computer status monitor which is specifically designed to present a view of the operation of a specific computational process as opposed to the operation of the computer.